WooCommerce Conversion Optimisation

Help! How do I plan my project?

Conversion is seriously important. It’s the metric that describes converting a maybe to a yeah! From a visitor to a customer.

You might laugh when you hear designers being pinickity about the colour of an add to cart button. What pantone shade is best. But these things matter.

Changing conversion rate just half a percentage point can be the difference between making it and not.

We talked about the importance of conversion rate in our WooCommerce growth hacking post. Head there first as the other part of the equation is having the traffic to start with.

Conversion multiplied by visitors equals orders.

So if we have 1000 visitors and we improve conversion rate from 2 to 2.5 that’s an extra 50 orders.

Setting conversion goals

What are the key goals of the site. What is the user journey you want to take your customers on?

With a WooCommerce site it is (primarily) the checkout. List down the steps you need to take to get to the checkout. Go through the site and mark down every click and every page that get’s between you and the card processing page.

Google Analytics eCommerce Goals

Make sure you have Google Analytics set up. It’s an essential tool.

Many themes will have their own options area to add Google Analytics tracking. You can also use the WooCommerce Google Analytics plugin. This will track your site and your conversion rate.

Once we have that setup we are collecting data and can work with that data.

The importance of user journey

First we recommend all site owners sketch a few ideal user journeys through their site. How will someone arrive on the site and navigate through it to make their purchase.

Don’t look at how it currently is, think about how it would be in an ideal world. We need this to work from.

Once we have these stages we can then look at optimising what currently exists.

Understanding Bounce Rate

One of the key ways we look at how to optimise each stage is to look at the bounce rate of a page.

Every page has a bounce rate; the proportion of visitors who leave (bounce) just after arriving. At each stage you will be loosing visitors. Google Analytics will measure this.

We need to optimise each stage and reduce the bounce rate.

It’s good to think of your user journey as a funnel. Isolate which stages have a high bounce rate and optimise them. Or even better, experiment by removing the stage completely.

Try and make the journey as seamless as possible for the visitor. Just look at how well Amazon have it. They have zero stages between product page and ordering. Just a one click buy now.

Optimising Out-of-the-box

I’ve seen plenty of out-of-the-box WooCommerce sites that have the following journey:

Home Page (click on product)

Product Page (click on add to cart and page refreshed)

Product Page (click on cart)

Cart (click on checkout)

Checkout

Hosted Order Page

That’s a lot of steps and if you have a single product then you wont need that many.

You can have a single add to cart button that takes you directly to the checkout which has a card processing facility on it. That’s 2 steps instead of 6.

There are general rules but nothing is set in stone. It completely depends on the user journey of your customer and the product(s) you sell. That will determine your goals and your user journey.

Track Everything

You don’t have to multi-variant test at low visitor numbers. In fact you won’t get accurate figures until you have a sizeable amount of traffic. But you should still be tracking what works and what doesn’t.

Track everything and see what works for you. Let data determine your conversion optimization strategy.

Generally speaking reducing the friction between intent and goal is the best way to improve your conversion rate.

It’s not the leads. The leads are not weak!

WooCommerce Conversion Rate Checklist

Finally here are some of the key items we look at when we look at an out-of-the-box WooCommerce site. What are your killer WooCommerce conversion tips? Let us know in the comments.

Optimise Homepage

Show your product key selling points straight away.

Clearly display a buy now button.

One Product? Then send customer straight to cart rather than via product page

Getting help to improve your CRO

We have a WooCommerce CTO package which looks at exactly these growth metrics. We work on an on-going basis as your Chief Technology Officer and provide the strategy to improve your conversion rate and ultimately, your store’s revenue.